How do humans reply to and review their sensory stories of the ordinary and man-made international? What does it suggest to talk of the ‘value’ of aesthetic phenomena? And in comparing human arts and artifacts, what are the standards for achievement or failure?

The 6th in a chain exploring ‘ancient values’, this ebook investigates from various views aesthetic worth in classical antiquity. The essays discover not just the evaluative recommendations and phrases utilized to the humanities, but additionally the social and cultural ideologies of aesthetic price itself. Seventeen chapters variety from the ‘life with out the Muses’ to ‘the Sublime’, and from philosophical perspectives to middle-brow and well known aesthetics.

Aesthetic worth in classical antiquity can be of curiosity to classicists, cultural and artwork historians, and philosophers.

How did an Athenian citizen deal with his spouse, his little ones, his puppy? How did they deal with him? the one facts now we have is within the type of written texts, yet how shut are those to spoken historical Greek? in response to a corpus of 11,891 vocatives from 25 authors, Dickey makes use of sociolinguistic recommendations and proof to reply to those questions.

The historic tragedy Octavia specializes in Nero's divorce from the princess Octavia, Claudius' daughter by means of Valeria Messalina, and at the emperor's next marriage to Poppaea Sabina. This publication encompasses a full-length creation, a brand new variation of the textual content in accordance with a clean exam of the manuscripts, and a close observation facing textual, linguistic, and literary issues.

How is it attainable that smooth students have labelled Maximus of Tyre, a second-century CE performer of philosophical orations, as a sophist or a ‘half-philosopher’, whereas his personal self-presentation is that of a real thinker? If we take Maximus’ declare to philosophical authority heavily, his case can deepen our realizing of the dynamic nature of Imperial philosophy.

Cf. n. 50 above. amousia: living without the muses 37 is entailed by those values. As that evidence helped to show, the values of mousikê, together with perceptions of the threat of amousia, attach themselves to core activities of song/poetry, music, and dance but also tend to configure themselves in terms of a number of social, educational, and ethical variables. They are, that is to say, a matter of aesthetics (in which ideas of beauty, form, expressiveness, and more besides, play a part) embedded in a larger matrix of cultural practices and standards.

The term amouson appears at the point at which Agathon, in response to the Kinsman’s barrage of innuendo about his feminine attire (see below), has attempted to explain his costume as part of a ‘mimetic’ act of poetic creativity in which he is assimilating his whole manner to that of female characters. The Kinsman has twice interrupted this explanation with obscene comments (153, 157–158). Seemingly ignoring these, Agathon continues by asserting (Ar. Thesm. 159–160): Besides, it’s such an uncultured sight to see a poet Who belongs in the fields and is shaggy all over.

It turns up in the scene early in Thesmophoriazusae where the young, supposedly effeminate tragedian Agathon is mocked by the old, uncouth Kinsman of Euripides. The whole context hinges on a comically intricate contrast which is both discursive and personal: a contrast in both speech styles and physical demeanor. The resulting collision is one to which connotations of amousia mentioned in the previous section are doubly germane: both in relation 34 For the current tendency to scale down the size of fifth-century audiences to perhaps 7000 or fewer, on the basis of a new archaeological reconstruction of the Theater of Dionysus, see Revermann 2006, 168–169, Csapo 2007, 97–100 (with the archaeological appendix by H.